A Pipeline Runs Through It

The Story of Oil from Ancient Times to the First World War

Author Keith Fisher

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'Fascinating revelations' Max Hastings, Sunday Times

'Wonderfully detailed and colourful' Steven Poole, Daily Telegraph

'The book I have long been waiting for... Essential reading' Michael Klare

Petroleum has always been used by humans: as an adhesive by Neanderthals, as a waterproofing agent in Noah's Ark and as a weapon during the Crusades. Its eventual extraction from the earth in vast quantities transformed light, heat and power. A Pipeline Runs Through It is a fresh, comprehensive in-depth look at the social, economic, political and geopolitical forces involved in our transition to the modern oil age. It tells an extraordinary origin story, from the pre-industrial history of petroleum through to large-scale production in the mid-nineteenth century and the development of a dominant, fully-fledged oil industry…

$41.00

August 27, 2024

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Keith Fisher has worked as a journalist and researcher on corporate and environmental issues. While studying, firstly, the MI6- and CIA-orchestrated coup against Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 following his nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and then the present-day geopolitics of energy supplies from the new republics of the former Soviet Union, he became fascinated both by the deep, yet historically quite recent, roots of the modern oil industry and by our complex, much older global relationship with oil. Following some fifteen years of thinking, researching and writing, A Pipeline Runs Through It is the remarkable result. Fisher lives in Oxford.